I turned away from the scene as Zack answered.
“Garner here.”
“Zack, I need Mzatal where I am—Tracy Gordon’s warehouse—as soon as possible,” I said, voice low and urgent. “There’s a man here who might hold some answers to the Mraztur’s plans, and he’s been shot. He’s close to death.”
I expected an I’ll get right on it or something like that. Instead there was only silence on the line. Dread curdled in my gut. While Eilahn’s ability to arcanely travel was drastically compromised on Earth, Zack was demahnk and didn’t have the same limitations. I knew he had the ability to get Mzatal here before Thatcher died. Why hesitate?
“Please,” I said. “I know you can do this. It’s important.” I glanced back at the trio. Eilahn’s face remained clenched in a rictus of concentration. Paul clutched at Thatcher’s hand as if holding him back from the jaws of death.
My dismay rose as Zack remained silent. “If he agrees,” he finally said, voice oddly taut.
If he agrees? My annoyance flared at his hesitation. “If Mzatal doesn’t agree, let me talk to him. This is important!”
“If he doesn’t agree, I’ll call back,” he replied, then disconnected.
I stared at the phone as shock and anger battled it out for precedence in my skull then jammed the phone into my pocket and returned to crouch beside Eilahn. “Zack was hesitant about coming,” I said in a low voice, “but he said he’d bring Mzatal if he agreed.” And if Mzatal didn’t agree, there would be some words between us. Oh, hell yeah.
She gave me a tight nod, then narrowed her eyes and focused on Thatcher. “You must stay here,” Eilahn told him. “Do not go. Stay here.”
“Yes, god, Bryce,” Paul wept openly. “You can’t leave me. Please. I . . . I can’t take it there without you!”
Thatcher’s hand spasmed in his. Blood bubbled in his mouth as his eyes sought Paul’s. The attachment between the two was clear. Though Paul looked to be around twenty, he radiated an innocence that made me think of him as younger. Thatcher might have been Paul’s bodyguard, but there was something deeper as well.
“Please. Please,” Paul continued, voice choked with barely restrained sobs. “I can’t stay there without you. I can’t do it. I’ll die. You’re all I have. You have to live!”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the guard stagger to his feet, then stumble toward the door. I briefly entertained the notion of chasing him down and securing him, then discarded it. I doubted he was going to run and tell anyone he’d just shot a guy. If charges needed to be pressed later, I could track him down through the security company.
Thatcher’s hand clenched on the kid’s again, then his head lolled to the side. Dead, I thought in dismay, then saw that blood still bubbled at his mouth. No. Not dead. Yet.
A ripple of arcane touched me. I turned to see Zack and Mzatal by the front entrance.
I stood as Mzatal strode toward us. “Boss, he’s in bad shape. Can you save him?”
The lord’s gaze went to the dying man, eyes narrowing at the severity of the injury. “I do not know,” he replied and went to one knee beside Thatcher as he said something in demon to Eilahn. He removed the blood-soaked shirt from the wound and laid his own hands over it, face hardening with intense focus.
Eilahn crouched nearby, naked to the waist, and obviously completely unconcerned by it. Zack remained at a distance, face expressionless and arms folded over his chest. Paul shifted back as Mzatal knelt, then looked up at him and went still, mouth dropping open. I had to control a smile. Yeah, Mzatal had that effect on people.
“I will need your assistance, zharkat,” Mzatal told me, voice tight. “He is very nearly gone.”
I’d never worked with him during a healing before, and I struggled for several precious seconds while I sought the best way to support. The lords didn’t heal with sigils and wards. As far as I could tell from all I’d witnessed, they healed by drawing damaged flesh together with elegant sutures of potency and then “reminding” the body of its proper form in order to restore itself—encouraging the tissues to heal a thousand times faster than naturally.
But no matter the method, it still required potency, and I could at least help collect and prepare the patterned strands.
Mzatal drew from me and through me the instant I touched the pattern. I sucked in a sharp breath while I sought to maintain the balance of the flow of power. Through the support connection I felt his struggle to hold a spark of life in Thatcher’s body. Sweat broke out on Mzatal’s brow, though he remained motionless. The strands burned away as he tapped them, and I was hard pressed to keep up with the drain and help control the integrity of the structure.
Thatcher coughed up a gout of blood and drew a gurgling breath. Paul surged forward to seize his hand again. “Bryce, oh god, come on,” he pleaded, eyes on his friend’s face. “You can do it. Don’t leave.”
With the initial heavy drain past, I balanced the flow to Mzatal to fuel his effort. Like a shadow seen through a sheer curtain, I watched him locate critical bleeding and weave repairs, felt him urge Thatcher’s body to remember its healthy state and form.
Again Thatcher coughed, but this time he followed it with a clearer breath. Through Mzatal, I felt his tenuous connection to life strengthen as the sense of drowning in his own blood decreased. Paul gripped Thatcher’s hand, yet his gaze remained on Mzatal, an almost worshipful expression on his face. He knew Mzatal was doing something miraculous to save his friend.
Thatcher’s face twisted in pain. “God . . . Oh, god,” he rasped, breath noisy, but without the horrible death-rattle gurgle of before. “P-Paul . . . okay?”
Tears spilled down the young man’s face as he gave his friend a tremulous smile. “I’m okay. You saved me.”
Even my cynical ass could appreciate the poignancy of the moment, but I didn’t have much chance to do so as a movement by the back door yanked my attention. At first I thought that perhaps it was emergency services, summoned by the damn security guard. It would be a bit of a pain to deal with cops or EMS right now, but—
I stared, mind in denial for several precious seconds as, impossibly, Katashi’s senior summoner strode into a warehouse on the outskirts of a small town in south Louisiana. Tsuneo, the treacherous asshole who bore a tattoo of Jesral’s mark on his hip, and who had performed a hostile summoning of Gestamar several months back. Beside him loomed another man I recognized from my brief time as Katashi’s student: Tito, not a summoner, more of a thug type with a sensitivity to the arcane.
Anger flared. “You!” I shot to my feet and moved to get in front of Mzatal and the others. I drew my gun even as Tito pulled his to put us into a great little standoff.
Tsuneo’s gaze hardened at the sight of me, but in the next instant his face went slack with shock as he not only saw Mzatal but felt his aura.
What the hell was Tsuneo doing here? For that matter, what were Thatcher and a computer nerd doing here? Was everyone here for a frickin’ arcane flash mob?
Moreover, was Thatcher also a summoner? Was Paul? Even more vital for Thatcher to live through this so we can question the hell out of him, I thought grimly.
I heard a hiss-growl from behind me, and the hair on the back of my neck lifted as Mzatal’s aura flared, dark with fury. He stood and stepped forward with hands still dripping blood, radiating Bad Mojo like a sun about to go supernova as he faced the traitorous summoner. His left fist remained clenched at his side as his right opened in a stance I recognized all too well. Lowering his head, he moved toward the interlopers.
Shit! I kept my gun leveled on Tito and risked a quick glance back at Thatcher. He still breathed, but I knew he was far from stable.
As Mzatal advanced, Tsuneo took a stumbling step back and looked around wildly as if trying to come up with a miraculous defense. He apparently concluded there was none because his next move was to run like hell for the exit.
Mzatal lifted his right hand and called scintillating blue-white potency to it even a
s Tsuneo darted through the door and out. Tito frowned, apparently balanced upon a razor’s edge decision of whether to fire or run.
Mzatal rendered the decision moot. Face stone-hard and focused, he hurled the potency at Tito like a lightning strike. The man screamed and dropped the gun as the burst impacted his belly and spread over him in a rippling cascade of light. He jerked heavily for several seconds, then crumpled to lie twisted and utterly still.
The deadly potency flickered and died as Mzatal continued forward. Behind me I heard Thatcher’s struggle for breath, and Paul’s agonized entreaties for him to hold on, to stay.
“Boss!” I yelled, holstering my gun. “You’re losing Thatcher. Let Tsuneo go! We’ll track his ass down later.”
Mzatal took two more steps then stopped, his hands clenched at his sides, violently seething potency boiling off of him. Yet he still didn’t turn back toward me and the man dying on the floor. I knew he wanted to pursue Tsuneo, exact revenge for the injury to Gestamar and the insult of the summoner’s betrayal and allegiance to the Mraztur.
“Boss,” I urged. “Mzatal, please! We need Thatcher alive.” Behind me, the wounded man’s breath grew more labored.
Mzatal remained lord-still for several more agonizing seconds while I fought the urge to grab him and pull him back to finish the healing. Finally he turned, met my eyes for a powerful instant before striding back to Thatcher. I let out a ragged sigh of relief as he knelt and placed his hands back on the mess of the chest wound.
I quickly resumed balancing the pattern and the flows, then looked back at the crumpled body of Tito. No doubt he was dead.
Shit. This was a mess.
Welcome to Earth, Boss, I thought with a sigh.
Chapter 11
I’d have downed more coffee if I’d known the day was going to descend into chaos so thoroughly. Now I had to figure out a way to clean up this clusterfuck.
“Zack.” I kept my voice low, but I knew he could hear me. “Maybe you should get hold of Ryan to help take care of—” I grimaced, lifted a chin toward the corpse. Under other circumstances Mzatal could have disposed of the body with a potency-fueled cremation. Yet I felt his reserves through our connection, and I knew he didn’t have the strength to do so and still have a chance of saving Thatcher.
Zack remained silent and still for several heartbeats, but finally gave a slight nod and pulled out his phone. He thumbed in a text message, sent it, then moved over to the dead man, crouched and laid a hand on his chest, face filled with a look of such unbearable sadness that I had to turn away. I heard him murmuring something over the body, but I was too far away to make out the words. The rhythm and lilt of it led me to believe it wasn’t English, though it didn’t sound like demon either.
Thatcher drew a steadier breath. Paul still clung to his friend’s hand, his eyes red and puffy in a face wracked with shock and desperation.
“What were you two doing here?” I asked.
It took a few seconds for Paul to realize I was talking to him, and another couple for him to focus on me. “It . . . it was my stupid idea,” he said, voice cracking. “This is all my fault.” His eyes dropped to Thatcher again. “I’m sorry, Bryce. Oh god, I’m so sorry.” His face twisted, and I reached out and seized his arm.
“Stop it,” I ordered. “He’s going to be all right.” I filled my voice with as much absolute certainty as possible. It helped that I truly did believe Mzatal would save the man’s life. “Why did you come here?” I pressed.
Paul’s eyes flicked up to Mzatal, and a whisper of hope crept into them. He swallowed, visibly struggled to be strong. “It was going to be at ten-seventeen a.m.,” he said and cast a worried look over to where his tablet lay where he’d dropped it. “There was going to be a wiggle in the feeds at ten-seventeen.” His lower lip quivered for an instant before he firmed his mouth and regained a bit of control. “I told him I wanted to come check it out. Made him bring me.”
I look at him in bafflement. “A what? A wiggle in the feeds? What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s, uh . . .” The grief on his face melted away as he focused on finding words to describe whatever it was. He opened his mouth to speak, then shook his head. “I do stuff with computers,” he explained, apparently giving up on providing details. “Lots of, er, deep level stuff. And I’d noted some, well, wiggles, shifts in the data patterns and streams. Always after the fact though. I figured out some of the parameters and extrapolated to predict one for today right here. I just wanted to be here to see what happened.”
I struggled to parse his explanation. Data patterns? Streams? “You do stuff with computers?” I echoed. “That’s it?”
A trace of insult crossed his face at the slight. “Yeah. That’s it.” His brow furrowed as he looked around, really looked around at us all for the first time. Zack and I probably looked normal enough, but Eilahn crouched shirtless near Thatcher’s feet, and there was no mistaking Mzatal for ordinary. And, of course, there was that pesky dead body not all that far away.
His attention returned to me. “Who are you people?”
“We’re . . . ” Shit. Now I was the one at a loss for how to explain things. “We’re the good guys, trust me,” I finally said lamely. “So, you don’t do any, er, arcane or ‘magic’ type stuff?” I even did the quotey marks with my fingers, which didn’t at all help how silly I felt asking him if he did magic.
Paul turned wide eyes to Mzatal again, and it was clear he knew something “magical” was happening to save his friend. He shook his head slowly, voice dropping to a rough whisper. “No.”
“What about him?” I asked, jerking my head toward Thatcher. “What’s he do? Does he do anything arcane?”
Paul looked back over at me. “He’s my bodyguard.” The sudden look of stunned realization that swept over his face was almost comical in its unabashed extreme. “Oh my god. He saved my life.”
I sat back on my heels and processed all he’d told me. According to Paul, neither of these two were arcane practitioners, though I knew he could easily be lying. Fortunately, I had a Mzatal-shaped lie detector, and as soon as he wasn’t otherwise occupied in major tissue and organ repair, I’d ask him to assess Paul and find out for sure.
But if Paul was telling the truth, and Thatcher wasn’t a summoner, then why on earth did Tracy have a bodyguard’s name in his journal? Maybe he’d planned on hiring one? Maybe Thatcher had actually worked for him at one point? Only the man bleeding on the floor could answer those questions.
I abruptly noticed that the blood on Paul wasn’t all Thatcher’s. “Your arm is bleeding,” I gently pointed out. Looked like the bullet had scored his left upper arm after exiting Thatcher’s chest.
Paul blinked and looked down at the shallow wound. I fully expected him to freak a bit at being shot, especially after being so upset about Thatcher, but to my surprise he simply gave a somewhat distracted frown. “Oh. Yeah. Guess it is.”
I took a closer look at him. Now I saw that his nose was slightly crooked, with a bump on one side that told me it had been broken. A thin scar ran along one cheekbone, and another one cut through an eyebrow. He’d taken damage before, I realized.
Falling silent, I continued to weave support while I wondered about this pair. Why did a computer nerd need a bodyguard? And how the hell had he used a computer to trace what he called a “wiggle” to this precise spot and time if he didn’t know about the arcane? Sure, Tracy—and obviously Tsuneo—had tracked it, but they were summoners. More questions to be answered.
“Enough,” Mzatal said after a while, voice drawn and lacking its usual resonance. He lifted his hands from Thatcher’s chest. Raw, angry tissue sealed the ugly wound, and though Thatcher’s skin still held a sickly pallor, he breathed slowly and with relative ease.
Blue-green potency flared on Mzatal’s hands as he burned the blood cleanly away. I felt his profound exhaustion, but there was no more I could do for him at this point except worry. I reached for his hand. He took it, ga
ve it a soft squeeze, conveying reassurance, affection, and gratitude in the simple gesture.
“Is he going to be okay?” Paul asked, face twisted with concern.
Mzatal met the young man’s eyes, remained silent for several heartbeats before answering. “He will recover, Paul Ortiz,” he told him. “Now breathe.”
Paul drew in a ragged breath and gazed up at Mzatal in utter awe.
The side door creaked as Ryan entered. He swept his gaze around the warehouse, taking it all in. His eyes briefly met mine before moving on to rest on the corpse, and I watched the emotions crawl over his face as the implications hit home. Mzatal had killed a man, and now Ryan, a federal agent, was expected to help cover it up. Ryan had dealt with a lot of grey areas in the past year, including faking a story about the death of Tracy Gordon. But this crossed another line.
Yet when his eyes returned to mine, they offered reassurance. It reminded me of the old saw, “A friend will help you move. A best friend will help you move bodies.” This was a horrible scenario fraught with all sorts of issues, but at the end of the day I knew he’d help me clean up the mess we were in.
I stood, legs a little shaky from managing the support for so long. “We need to get these two back to the house,” I told Ryan with a nod toward Paul and Thatcher. “And take care of . . .” I gestured toward Tito.
He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “Right. Zack gave me a summary in his text. I’m thinking.”
“Wait. House?” Paul scrambled to his feet to stare at me in horror. “What house? I can’t go!” Terror suddenly flooded his face for no reason I could pinpoint. “We can’t go,” he gasped, then fumbled in his pocket and pulled out his phone. “We can’t go! Oh, god. I need . . . I need to make a call!”
“No!” I lunged to grab his arm. “No. Paul, please, you have to trust me. Your friend needs more care.” I searched his face. Sweat dotted his upper lip, and his breath came in short panicked gasps. “And you’re somewhere you don’t want to be,” I said. I hadn’t forgotten what he’d said to Thatcher when he thought the man was dying: I can’t take it there without you! I can’t stay there without you. I can’t do it. I’ll die.
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